Though Holler and Jaar couldn't be more different, both highlight the way the art experience is attenuated by how the artist/institution divide is negotiated (Jaar is very selective and insists on carte blanche). True, all art exhibitions represent a kind of experience but some are intended primarily as such... (more)

- Wynde Dyer's For Sale By Owner: 1751 Easy Street, an excitingly large 1/2 scale model of her childhood home. Dyer built the replica on-site from memory using traditional wooden lathe construction. She plans to torch the whole piece after the show closes.
- Rhoda London's and..., an examination of myth and memory using artifacts and drawings. Harrison Higgs contributes a video of blurry "purgatorial space."
- Richard Schemmerer's Framed or Frame of Mind, a grid of assemblages and peculiarly angled picture frames.
- Jane Schiffhauer's The Myth of Memory, a multimedia installation about gender, power and personal narrative. Features a glass ladder (leading to an even peskier glass ceiling?!)
- Jamie Marie Waelchli's translations, a video projection about the slow decline of words into gobbledygook. Cameo by Google Translate.

For the party, Jason King will also unveil PositionMax Beta, a sculptural work involving new performance technology. A stealth apparatus "allows previously unmanageable positions to be held steadily by performers over long periods of time." The result? Still human forms with superhuman durability.

All of this is interesting because I don't dig Kippenberger all that much (saw his retrospective at MoMA and liked about 5% of it). Still he's influential, so influential that most MFA programs look like tribute cover bands devoted to Kippenberger. Generally, if I don't like something I try to revisit it as much as possible to understand why the work does or doesn't work... if I come back several times it means it is successful in some way that deserves scrutiny.

The fact that it is here though is a good enough reason to visit PAM, which also has a Chris Burden show up.

Here's what Chief Curator Bruce Guenther says about the Kipster, "Dissuaded of art's power to reveal truth or the possibility of producing original work, he nonetheless produced new important work with a strong political and social content, revealing, as John Lane observed, 'a moralist in despair.' The exhibition features a selection of paintings from the last decade of the artist's life and fourteen 'Hotel Drawings,' intimate works created on hotel stationary gathered on his peripatetic travels from 1987 until 1997. The works present an irreverent and ferocious humor that cumulatively accentuate the late artist's acute sense of moral responsibility to humanity and the history of art."

Look I'll say this, if you like Rock's Box at all... this is a show you have to see if you live in Portland . Through February 19th, but don't wait that long.

12128 boatspace presents I WANT TO BELIEVE, a "flat-footed, autobiographical" ride through the pop culture ruminations of Car Hole Gallery founder Sam Korman. "Think of a joke, mass-less, in a minimalist atmosphere. It probably didn't make you laugh." Did I mention there's aliens?

It is short notice but perhaps you can catch Avantika Bawa's 4:00PM talk at Linfield tomorrow. Over the years she has demonstrated that she has an acute eye for frayed perceptual procedures that present themselves as diagrammatic territory.

According to the press release, "Bawa creates new territory between sculpture and painting, similar to her ability to navigate the borders between two cultures – Indian and American. She is influenced by: minimalism, or the reduction of art to basic shapes, colors, and textures; installation art, which is the temporary transformation of spaces; and the interruption of space that brings viewers a new understanding..." (more)

Quick, let's play word association: "cheap." Nothing? Okay, linoleum." Yeah, grandma's kitchen floor. That's exactly what I was thinking. But evidently, that's not what Geoffrey KixMiller, Philly-based artist who is now showing at Portland's Appendix Project Space, was thinking. It took me ages to find this gallery—supposedly one of two "it" places to see art in Portland right now—but wandering in the dark through the backstreets of the Alberta arts district, I finally saw a tiny unlit alleyway next to a gym... (more)

Archer Gallery presents Plazm: 20 Years of Art and Design. The exhibition traces the rise of the magazine from "collaborative creative resource" to "high profile cultural force," also detailing the design ventures that support its publication.

For today's talk Creative Director and Co-Founder Joshua Berger speaks about the history, curation and vision of the magazine.

Yesterday Roberta Smith took on the sprawling Pacific Standard Time complex... aside from the idea that LA is the only west coast hotbed for art it's interesting to read how the east coast is discovering the depth of the West Coast. The truth is there is a Mexico to British Columbia thing that has been in force for at least 3 decades now. Hopefully all this talk of region will evolve the way we discuss San Diego, LA, San Fran, Las Vegas, Eugene, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle and Vancouver BC.

Jerry Saltz softens up to Maurizio Cattelan. I find Cattelan mostly dull except a few standouts like Him and La Nona Ora. He's the Carrot Top of the art world for me... worthy of respect in that he has survived so long but ultimately not doing his best work anymore, mostly because the method wasn't that rich with material to begin with.

Cinema Project presents a special, one-night screening of Lillian Schwartz's pioneering computer animation. As a consultant at Bell Laboratories in the 1970s, Schwartz developed computerized techniques for merging sound, art and video. Her innovative research makes her the grand dame of computer-generated art and computer-aided art analysis... including contemporary film, video, animation, graphics, multimedia, special effects and virtual reality.

"In the traditional of 'visual music,' her work from this period features animated computer-based shapes and fields— transformed through color gels and film stock— that synch, pulse, and grow to the equally distinct and complex computer and electronic soundtracks."

On Monday, the latest of OCAC's new talk series Connection: Intersecting Tradition and Innovation brings Portland a doosey, MacArthur fellow Alfredo Jaar. Known for staging incredibly clear meditations on very difficult subjects like the Rwandan Genocides or intellectuals under pressure in dictatorial regimes his work is both sparse and emotionally devastating. His installation, the Sound of Silence is one of the very best art pieces I have ever encountered. There is only room for 20 or so more people so I suggest you jump on this talk at Blue Sky Gallery. You must RSVP for the event: 971-255-4165

Lumber Room presents Interior Margins, an exhibition "bringing together the work of an intergenerational group of Northwest women artists who are transforming the diverse legacies and practices of abstraction for a new era." Cooley director Stephanie Snyder curates in collaboration with Lumber Room founder Sarah Miller Meigs.

Vanessa Renwick delivers this month's Happy Hour Talk at PAM. A documentarian, installation artist and official director of the Oregon Department of Kick Ass, Renwick is a "filmmaker by nature, not by stress of research... Her iconoclastic work reflects an interest in place, relationships between bodies and landscapes, and all sorts of borders."

Here is what James is promising, "A dispassionate investigation into the suitability of planet earth for human habitation reveals 10 to the 23rd power building code violations.

From 'Violations of Shape' to 'Violations Based on Natural Malice', the entire range of geological transgressions will be systematically categorized into a rigorous framework. Using this framework it will be possible to devise strategies for clearing the backlog of violations with bureaucratic efficiency.

James M Harrison has made a career of taking the craft practices of one genre and incorrectly breeding them with the craft practices of a different genre."

When PICA announced last summer that they had received a $200,000 ArtPlace Grant I was cautiously skeptical they would fully leverage the opportunity of
a medium sized, not huge grant. 200k does go fast when you get involved in civic buildings.
I felt like they might just float between a couple moldering properties on the
East Side of Portland, rather than take the responsibility of a full time presence
in Portland more seriously. I love PICA but as a "burned" past supporter I'm hard on them. Think of me as the grumpy old uncle who loved them
as a cute kid and beamed as they grew into adulthood (with their Pearl District
gallery) but was publicly
heartbroken when they decided to throw it all away and shirk responsibility
back in 2004 when they stopped being a major full-time vis arts institution and became
a festival with a vis art component. Ultimately in the intervening 7 years their vis arts program became less focused, with its series
of provisional/compromised spaces and scattered attention during TBA festivals.

Unfinished space that is to be the new PICA HQ (photo Andrew Billing)

Well today, I'm less skeptical with announcement that they will indeed have
a nice headquarters space at 415 SW 10th Ave. It is just down the street from Powell's and is described as a hub office, not merely a
series of ever changing off site encampments (which they will also undertake). The permanent space
does make PICA suddenly a lot more exciting. There is something more grown up... (more)

Archer Gallery presents Plazm: 20 Years of Art and Design. The exhibition traces the rise of the magazine from "collaborative creative resource" to "high profile cultural force," also detailing the design ventures that support its publication.

Creative Director and Co-Founder Joshua Berger speaks about the history, curation and vision of the magazine in a Clark Art Talk next week.

Littman Gallery presents foreGround, curated by PORT's own Jeff Jahn. The show addresses the "pervasive but often hidden influence of geology on contemporary life," and features works by Zachary Davis, Arcy Douglass, Jacqueline Ehlis, Jim Neidhardt, Matthew Picton and Ben Young.

"Call it existential geology. The show sidesteps the literal landscape to get at things hidden in plain view. It is a landscape show which explicitly avoids traditional landscape art in order to explore geology's existential, intellectual and spatial impact on our lives."

FalseFront presents MAGIC > NATURE, the first in a rolling series of group shows curated by invited regional artists. This month's stylists: Michael Endo and Emily Nachison. "Drawing on the lost symbolic languages of pseudo-sciences, synthetic colors and mimetic natural environments, these artists pick up the remnants of our disenchanted world and seek to assemble new truths and speak to our desire to have our world re-enchanted."

Newspace presents In My Room, photographs by Andrea Land. "Each young girl, while physically existing in the natural world, also thrives in another realm, an insular dream state, with her gaze turned inward. The photographs exist as both fictional and autobiographical creations."

Over in the special exhibitions gallery, Lisa Wells and Bobby Abrahamson present The 45th Parallel, a documentary project profiling three endangered rural towns in Oregon.

"Appropriating visual material from tech marketing, Disney movies and the decorative arts, language from pop culture and philosophy, and even cannibalizing their own work, these artists investigate continuities so familiar as to be invisible."

OSU Department of Art kicks off its Visiting Artists & Scholars series with a lecture by Alice Aycock.

"Internationally known for her large scale, contemporary public sculptures... Alice Aycock has exhibited in major museums and galleries nationally as well as Europe and Japan. Her works can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Louis Vuitton Foundation; LA County Museum; and the National Gallery, Washington DC."

"Aycock's public sculptures can be found throughout the United States, including the San Francisco Public Library, a large-scale sculptural roof installation for the East River Park Pavilion on 60th Street in NYC, and
'Star Sifter' for Terminal 1 at JFK International Airport... A permanent public artwork for Washington Dulles International Airport, Washington, DC will be completed in 2011, as well as a piece for Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan in 2012."

The list for the 10th Northwest Biennial at the Tacoma Art Museum has been announced. For the first time it will include our Canadian friends in British Columbia, something I've criticized all so called Northwest surveys for not doing. This year the survey focuses on "interdisciplinary art practices."

Chris Burden: Let's see. The Ghost Ships. They came about by being asked by Mary Jane Jacobs who had been chief curator at MOCA in LA but was now working in Chicago as an independent curator. She was in charge of the Spoleto Music Festival, the art component of it, in 91'. She invited 20 different artists to do projects as part of the music festival, I was one of them. I had been conscious of this boat designer Phil Bolger who was known for making these seaworthy small boats that were ocean capacity and were real simple to build. He was an anti-yachting kind of guy. So I proposed that... (more)